The Great Vowel Shift Continued

• The reasons behind this shift are something of a mystery, and linguists have been unable to account for why it took place. It was first identified and studied by Otto Jesperson, a linguistfrom Denmark, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

• Most linguists agree that the Great Vowel Shift did not occur all at once, which accounts for the creative spellings of many English words. Some printers might still have employed an earlier vowel pronunciation when spelling, making English one of the most challenging languages to spell, because so many exceptions to spelling rules exist.

• Some linguists account for the change by suggesting that England’s rule by the French led to disenchantment with French pronunciation of vowels, which is a similar pronunciation to that of Middle English. To distance themselves from prior French occupation and rule, the English ruling class may have deliberately changed the ways vowels were pronounced to reflect that theirs was a different language

• Another theory  is that England may have had several influential people with speech impediments, and such mispronunciations might be copied in deference to someone of high enough rank.

Historical linguistics

• Historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics) is the study of language change.

• Diachronic: The study of linguistic change through history contrasted to Synchronic linguistics: The study of the phonological, morphological, and syntactic features of a language at a stated time.

• Historica linguistics has five main concerns:

• to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages

• to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics)

• to develop general theories about how and why language changes

• to describe the history of speech communities.

Historical linguistics

Language Change

• Any treatment of linguistics must address the question of language change. The way languages change offers insights into the nature of language itself and the possible answers to why languages change tell us about the way language is used in society, about how it is acquired by individuals and may reveal to us something about its internal organisation.

Comparative Method

• Comparative Method: Refers to the practice of comparing forms in two or more languages with a view to discovering regularities of correspondence. A simple instance from English and German concerns /t/ and /s/..

• With a series of native words, i.e. not loans, one can see that where English has /t/ German has /s/: water : Wasser,  beter: besser, foot:Fuss It is obvious here that English /t/ corresponds to German /s/ in non-initial position. The question which remains is whether the /t/ or the /s/ is original.

Speech Community

• A speech community is a group of people who share a set of norms and expectations regarding the use of language.

• to study the history of words, i.e. etymology

• Etymology: is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time

• Modern historical linguistics dates from the late 18th century. It grew out of the earlier discipline of philology: the study of ancient texts and documents i.e. literary texts and of written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning dating back to antiquity.

Antiquity

• The ancient past, especially the period of classical and other human civilizations before the Middle Ages.

Dialectology

• The scientific study of linguistic dialect, the varieties of a language that are characteristic of particular groups, based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features.

• Dialectologists are concerned with grammatical features that correspond to regional areas.

Phonology

• Sound change

• A sub-field of linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific language or set of languages. Whereas phonetics is about the physical production and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages

Morphology

• Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word-formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages, in the context of historical linguistics, how the means of expression change over time

Syntax

• The study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages. The term syntax is used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language

Lexicon

• The vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge.

• In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes.

Study Questions

• What are the main concerns of Historical Linguistics?

• Mention four main influences of the Normans on the English society and language.

• What are the main theories that explain the Great Vowel Shift?